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1. The problem with your style of argument, and with mythicism in general, is the exact same question can be asked of you: where is the evidence of a non-corporeal Jesus?
2. This isn't about shifting burden of proof; I'm not arguing for a historical Jesus or absolutely wedded to the idea. Instead, the issue at stake is how one interprets the core sources, ie the books of the New Testament, patristic writings, apocrypha, etc, to trace back the origins of Christianity, as a matter of history.
3. The question of whether Jesus 'really existed' or not is not immediately crucial to reconstructing the origins of Christianity if one chooses to adopt a skeptical, secular perspective; what would actually be crucial is tracing the evolution of religious ideas and texts in time and space, investigating the personalities involved and backtracking the growth of Christian churches to their apparent origins in 1st Century Palestine.
Those religious ideas and texts revolve around Jesus-belief encompassing a set of sayings, parables, moral teachings, miracles, life story episodes, theological conceptions and soon enough orthodoxies, heterodoxies and heresies, which evolved historically.
This means taking the sources, including the NT texts, seriously for what they are: religious texts. But also taking the diversity seriously. There are not that many religions where four variations on a core story emerge in a fairly short space of time, and are attested to as 'gospels' fairly rapidly.
The synoptic problem points to a common set of sources that preceded the synoptic gospels, much revolving around a collection of sayings, teachings and parables, with some overlap with non-canonical sources (like the Gospel of Thomas). These sayings and teachings were enough to evolve a new religion out of Judaism, so they have at least some significance, whatever one thinks of Christianity as a whole.
The variations in the texts (gospels) point to a common oral tradition as a source for at least part of the texts, and once redacted into literary form, the texts display at least some Aramaicisms, which supports the advertised origins in 1st Century Palestine, something that is also supported by an emphasis on halakhic disputes and thus Judaic religious law.
All of these sayings and teachings are attributed to a certain Jesus, a not uncommon 1st Century Palestinian Jewish name. But the texts also mention a variety of other figures - a number of apostles and acolytes who are followed by others, including the gospel-writers. We can rule out the three synoptic gospel-writers as the sole authors of this material, not least because gThomas refutes such a theory, due to the overlap in content: this stuff was circulating more widely and was evidently not confined to a literary form from the outset.
The catch for mythicism's typical mode of argumentation is that such material cannot be dismissed as "fiction" since it conveys theological, moral and legal ideas. Those ideas came from somewhere and came from somebody or several somebodies.
It's perfectly possible the sayings and teachings were crowd-sourced, but these were for the time, apparently powerful religious ideas, and many were also innovative for that era. One would have to explain either why very anonymous teachers cohered together into the supposed Jesus tradition, or why slightly less anonymous teachers (say, the disciples and gospel-writers) forewent the credit for authoring the ideas. The most parsimonious explanation is that there really was a teacher named Jesus, some of whose sayings were recorded by his disciples and eventual followers. This is how the followers presented things subsequently.
It would be very nice to have external confirmation of this, but we also appear to lack external disconfirmation of this account.
None of this precludes another explanation, nor does it make sense of the miracles and ancient biography components of the gospels (both of which are much better candidates for literary fabrication). But this is why posters like Argumemnon, Craig B and myself are HJ-minimalists.
OK, if you are going to talk about
"the problem with my style of argument", then the first thing to note in your first highlighted sentence above (i.e., "
1"), is that I am not proposing any "mythicism". I have no idea whether Jesus was mythical or not. And I could not put (and never have put) any notional odds on it, neither 0%, or 100%, nor any %age in between. So I definitely do not need to do as you say
"(provide you with) the evidence of a non-corporeal Jesus" - I have no obligation whatsoever to do that (I am not claiming he was a myth).
So that statement from you in highlight 1, is simply 100% wrong. The same
question burden does
not fall on me. I am not claiming Jesus was a myth (I have no strong opinion on whether he was, or was not, a myth). All I am claiming is that the evidence presented so far (e.g. by bible scholars such as Bart Ehrman) is unconvincing in the extreme.
Highlight
2 - I was replying specifically to Gdon who has specifically already told us that he is a Chrsitian and believes Jesus was real. And what I said was that he (Gdon) is trying to shift the burden of providing
proof evidence, when says that I must provide some alternative myth theory for Jesus. I have no obligation to do any such thing (although many other people have done exactly that, both here in these recent HJ threads, and in countless HJ-sceptic books … so there are plenty of myth theories, though none of them from me).
The burden of
proof evidence rests entirely upon those who say they believe Jesus was more likely than not to have been a real person ... their burden is simply to tell us what they are relying upon as their evidence. Gdon has just told us that he takes the gosples and letters of the bible to be his evidence for believing Jesus was real ... i.e. good enough evidence to conclude greater than 50% probability (that's what it means to say you believe on the balance of evidence that he was probably real) ... all that I am saying about that, is that such biblical writing is not in fact evidence of a human Jesus ever known to any of those biblical writers at all.
Highlight
3 - and I think I will stop at this 3rd highlight (without reading the rest of your reply in any detail) because there is more than enough to be going on with in these three points (though we have been over all 3 points at least 1000 times before in these threads ... literally 1000 times or more!); we are not arguing about quote
"The question of .... reconstructing the origins of Christianity"! ... nobody is disputing that people who we now call "Christians" existed at some early date (e.g. 1st century), and that they believed a figure known as Iesous/Yehoshua (i.e. "Jesus" in 12th century English) had once been the miraculous messiah. That is not any part of any dispute here ...
... what is in dispute is whether or not the material claimed as evidence (claimed mainly by bible scholars, the Church, and Christian writers in general), is good enough to conclude that Jesus was most probably a real person at the level of better than 50% likelihood. And what I am saying, and what I think other sceptics here are saying, is that not only does the claimed evidence fall well short of that level, but that in fact there is barely any such genuine evidence at all ... and let's be clear that means "evidence of that which is being claimed" (not merely evidence of un-evidenced faith-belief), and that claim is that Jesus existed as an ordinary non-miraculous human preacher in the 1st century such that he was indeed
the figure described in the gospels and letters of the bible ...
... that evidence for Jesus as a human person known to anyone in that biblical writing, is practically, if not literally, 100% non-existent. And that's the issue. That is the problem.
And by the way – in case any of the above sounds like I am “having a go” at Gdon, I am not doing that. Not at all. I know that he is a Christian and of course he believes that the evidence is good enough to confirm to himself that Jesus did exist. Fine. But all that I am trying to get Gdon to understand is why I, and all other sceptics (here or anywhere else), will certainly not agree that the bible is “good enough evidence” … to think that the bible is “good enough evidence” is frankly delusional at best.
And, whilst I am on the issue of disclaimers - if any of my above reply sounds to you (i.e. “reads” to you) as strident or insistent etc., then again ; it is absolutely not that at all. All I am trying to do is to point out (or explain) why it is unacceptable to claim that either the bible or non-biblical sources such as Tacitus and Josephus cannot be regarded as credible evidence for any of those writers ever knowing any human Jesus. And nor can they be claimed as credible evidence for any of those writers even reporting reliable sources who ever told them of anyone ever having known or met a human Jesus. There is nothing at all in any of that non-biblical writing to show that any of those who wrote about belief in Jesus, had actually ever known any genuine evidence whatsoever of any living human Jesus.
That's the problem – total 100% lack of any genuine credible honest evidence.
And that situation is seriously compounded by the fact that even to this day, bible scholars and other Christian writers are still persuading people that the bible provides evidence so strong that they
“all” claim it be absolute literal
“certainty” of a HJ (e.g. Bart Ehrman in
“Did Jesus Exist?”, repeatedly says it's an absolute
“certainty” that Jesus existed, for which he adds that
“every properly trained scholar on the planet” agrees with him!). And his readers, and seemingly all HJ posters here, actually believe bible scholars like Ehrman to be trusted authorities who are cited as an
"appeal to authority" when they repeatedly & constantly write things like that … here, on this forum, people may not agree it's a “certainty”, but they will nevertheless repeatedly “fall back” on a position of making an appeal to authority in those same bible scholars who make exactly that same statement of “certainty”.
And as a final disclaimer, for the sake of clarity (because it appears to need endless repetitions of the same clarifying statements) – I have nothing in particular against Ehrman, and I think he does actually write quite well (better & clearer than Carrier, for example), except when he tries to claim such things as saying in his book that we actually have no less than 7 gospel sources for a HJ, which he says are
“seven written sources” and
“seven independent sources”, and those are
“g-Mark, g-Mathew, g-Luke, g-John, Q, M and L” … according to Ehrman, those are seven
independent written sources that provide the evidence to show a HJ. Really, it's quite astounding that a long-established university academic could write something as absurd and demonstrably untrue as that … and even more astonishing that relatively well educated people here (inc. many atheists) could ever believe and repeat such abject nonsense from biblical studies teachers.
) He's writing epistles. It's more akin to what nowadays you'd call writing a paper, except, of course, it didn't have to be held to the same academic standards. Everything in there is there to make a point, or address a point.
